


What Happened To Emma Whitmore

by only_freakin_donuts



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Character Study, Christmas Is Canon, Emma Whitmore Character Study, Emma is dead, Flynn is dead, Sassy!Flynn, Spiritual Guide!Flynn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 11:10:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18737842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/only_freakin_donuts/pseuds/only_freakin_donuts
Summary: How many times have you asked yourself, how your life would be different if one thing never happened?





	What Happened To Emma Whitmore

**Author's Note:**

> Hello lovely people! Thanks for stopping by. I've had a lot of fun writing this fic, it was a very interesting process to pick Emma's brain over 10k words, and I hope you enjoy reading it. 
> 
> The title comes from two things: firstly, from a line Jiya said back in 1x12, talking to Mason. "You thought I couldn’t handle it, what happened to Emma Whitmore?" And secondly, from a thing that's said in social work practice. As roughly paraphrased from something a professor told me this semester "we don't ask what's wrong with a person, we ask what happened to them." 
> 
> This fic is split into six different timelines, separated by line breaks. The idea is that everything is the same as canon in the timelines, except one thing, and it'll be clear what that is. **Content warnings vary by timeline:**  
>  \- Timeline 2 deals with themes of domestic violence.  
> \- Timeline 3 has a brief discussion about oral sex.  
> \- Timeline 5 discusses abortion.  
> The timelines do not interconnect so you can skip one and be a-okay to read the rest of the fic! Please take of yourself!
> 
> Here's my playlist that goes with this fic! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5gwxQ3FCliMvteewc-ev2SPc-lG_dzCv

It hurt. It hurt a lot. She’d been shot before, but this time the pain was different. It ripped through her in a way that… felt like she was dying. Was she dying, is this what dying felt like?

She’d never believed what people said, that before you died your life flashed before your eyes, like a movie, or one of those viewfinder toys from the 90s. Besides, she wouldn’t have much to see anyway. Nothing she’d want to see, at least. She didn’t believe in an afterlife either. Just that you finally got the peace that you could never find while you were still breathing. In the absence of life came solace; or so she could only hope. 

Now, on the frozen floor of Hungnam, as she struggled for breath, she doubted that. This was not relief, this was not the warm embrace of inevitable eternity… she wanted this to be over more than anything. Maybe if she closed her eyes… 

“Emma,” she heard. She felt as though she should recognize the voice, but she didn’t. It was fuzzy and sounded far away from her. “Emma, c’mon.”  
Now she recognized that voice. . “Flynn?”  
She cocks an eye open and indeed, there he is, squatting down beside her with a displeased look on his face. He didn’t feel quite real, it didn’t feel like he was really there. He wasn’t.  
“Come on, get up. It won’t hurt you, I promise.”  
“Your promises don’t mean a lot.”  
He chuckles grimly, helping her to her feet. “Coming from you, that’s a rich statement.”  
“You here to escort me to my seat in Hell?” she asks. “If that’s the case, just leave me here in Hungnam.”  
“We’re not in Hungnam anymore, Emma, look around,” Flynn tells her. “Do you know where we are?” 

She hadn’t even realized she hadn’t opened her eyes in the same spot she’d closed them. They were in fact no longer in North Korea, but in the dark of night and the silence that surrounded them, she couldn’t quite place where they were. It felt eerily familiar, though.

“Wait a minute,” she says, furrowing her brows. A ways ahead of them, she’d spotted a mailbox, light blue with red wildflowers tied to it, and an eight letter last name painted in black letters along the side. “We’re in St. Louis,” she answers finally, a tinge of disappointment in her tone. “This is the house I grew up in.”  
“It’s a nice house,” he answers. “Looks like a nice family lives here.”  
She turns to him with a scowl, still avoiding looking back at that house. “Nothing nice ever lived here.” 

“You sure about that?” Flynn asks, as she turns and stalks towards the bungalow behind them, her footsteps crunching in the dry grass. No one can hear them, it’s fine.  
“Afraid of what you’ll see if you look inside?” he asks her. “They can’t see you, you can get as close as you want, you know.”  
“I don’t want,” Emma mutters, her back still turned to the window. But she sees Flynn watching something, something she’d see if she just turned around. “What do you see?” she pesters him.  
“I see you,” he tells her. “At least, I think it’s you. She’s got braids and pajamas with stars, she’s missing a front tooth, which I can see because she’s smiling. She thinks her dad hung the moon.”  
“What year is it?” Emma interrupts.  
“You look to be around seven years old. That would make it, what, ‘89?”  
“It starts soon then,” she answers simply. “He starts soon. I thought it would’ve started already, but, guess not.”  
“You are so close to understanding the conditions of our visit here,” Flynn tells her. “So, so close.” With a gesture, he invites her again to the window. And this time, she accepts.

She sees her younger self pulling a coat and a pompom hat on over her pajamas and wet hair, and her dad putting his coat and boots on too. Her and Flynn meet them out back, they sit on the steps, just a few feet away from them. There, little Emma’s sitting in her dad’s lap, cupping a mug of hot cocoa.  
“You see that?” he asks her. “What’s that one called again?”  
She answers with a big grin, Emma sees that spot where her front tooth would soon be. “That’s Ursa Major! It’s spring, we can see her now!”  
“Yeah, isn’t she a pretty one?” her dad responds.  
“When I become an astronaut princess, I’m gonna go see her,” she says. “Maybe you can come too.”  
“I would love to,” he answers with a laugh. He presses a kiss to her head, and she looks up at him with a big smile. “I love you, sweet pea.”  
“I love you too, Daddy.” 

Emma turns away, Flynn can see she’s about to burst. “Yell as loud as you want. He can’t hear you.”  
“I don’t want to yell at him, I want to yell at you!” she responds, still not quite yelling as she paces the yard. “What are we doing here, what is this? A walk through my pathetic life before I die my pathetic death? I got shot by a commie in North Korea, on a mission that _I_ instigated cause _I’m_ petty– so yeah, maybe I deserved it. Now, let’s relive the top 5 other moments I deserved through the years...”  
Flynn shakes his head, clasping his hands together. “That’s not what this is.”  
“Then what is this, Flynn?” she asks.  
“How many times have you asked yourself, time and time again, how your life would be different if one thing had never happened? If something were different?” After a pause, with Emma still looking at him like he has three heads, he continues. “How many times have you asked yourself what your life would look like if your father hadn’t hurt you and your mother?” 

Admittedly, pretty often. Every time she felt herself slip further and further away from the person her mother hoped she would become– from the person _she_ had hoped she would become– she asked herself that. Every nuanced, screwed up, bitchy thing that she did, she blamed him. He made her this way. It was his fault. But if he hadn’t, what then?  
“That little girl,” Flynn continues, pointing to her as she points up at the stars, “She’s never felt what you have, and she never will. She will know the unconditional love of a father. She will have parents who love each other and grow old together.”  
“She’s got it all,” Emma says to herself, jamming her hands in her pockets and lowering her eyes. “How does she turn out?” she asks him.  
Flynn’s surprised by her gentle, low energy tone. “I don’t know,” he admits. “How do you think she turns out? What’s the story you’ve created for her in your head?” 

Emma huffs. “Well,” she starts, still looking at the young girl as she looks at the stars, “She made friends easily, she was much more personable and friendly than I was. The best friend she made in kindergarten, they actually stay friends. She’ll get a boyfriend in high school, he won’t be perfect, cause he’s still a boy, but he treats her right and makes her happy for a while. They go their separate ways in college like all high school couples do. She had a good male role model, so she doesn’t exclusively date losers and scumbags. She goes to college on the West Coast instead of the East, design school. Lord knows she’s smart, but, not the most motivated. She likes a good party. Her sole motivation is that she wants to make her parents proud, she wants to be worth their investment in her. Even when she moves away she calls them every night, her kids know their grandparents. She has it good.”  
“Design school isn’t quite the road to becoming an astronaut princess,” Flynn says lightly.  
Emma shrugs it off. “Her dreams change a little bit.” 

They sit in silence, the four of them, until little Emma had drifted off to sleep on her dad’s chest; or she’s just pretending so he’ll carry her inside, cause Flynn could swear he saw her smile. That’s what his daughter would’ve done.  
“She’s gonna be okay,” Flynn says. “We’re here cause you wonder about her. We came so you could see for yourself, she’s okay.”  
Emma nods. “Where else are we going?”  
“You tell me,” Flynn answers. “What else have you wondered? What would be different if one thing never happened? And that’s where your mind will take us.”  
So, in the silence of the now vacant yard, she closes her eyes, and she thinks. Then, they go. 

\-------------

“God, the sounds of the 90s,” Flynn mumbles, his ears hurting from the music. He can tell they’re somewhere in Emma’s teenage years without even opening his eyes. “You were into grunge?”  
“Wasn’t everyone at least a little bit?” she asks back with amusement. While Flynn closes his eyes and grumbles like the old man he is, she’s wide-eyed and looking around, trying to articulate where they are now. They seem to have landed themselves in the bedroom of a teenage punk in the mid-90s, except it wasn’t the bedroom Emma remembered. The walls are covered with posters and painted slate grey, haphazardly covering a coat of baby blue, the floor’s got flannel shirts, ripped jeans, and band tees strewed about, and the music is coming from an obnoxiously loud stereo system on a shelf above the bed.  
“Certainly smells like teen spirit in here,” Flynn gawks, stepping around the mess, as Emma takes a peek out the window. She groans. “We’re still in St. Louis,” she tells Flynn.  
“The same house?” he asks. “I thought you and your mother left St. Louis?”  
She gives him a pointed look. “Ah,” he nods. “That’s the point of this, I get it.” After a long moment, he continues. “So she left her stereo on.... but where is she?” 

“Emma!” they hear from downstairs. “Jesus Christ, turn that shit off and get down your ass down here, you’re gonna be late!”  
A door down the halls thunders open with a moody teenager’s bellow. “I’m coming!” That moody teenager– wearing a black beanie over straight, shoulder-length hair, a flannel top over rolled up jeans, and black converse sneakers, not to mention a lot of eyeliner– then comes storming into her bedroom, which they are standing in. Even though they aren’t in her way, they make sure to stay out of it anyways. She’s scary, even Emma herself has to admit so.  
“I was not like that in this timeline,” Emma admits. “She’s the kind of girl I never had the guts to be, woulda scared my mom half to death.”  
“I would be willing to bet she _is_ scaring her mom half to death,” Flynn notes. “But, judging by the way she’s applying concealer right now, I’d guess her father doesn’t care much.”  
She’s careful, looking in the mirror and methodically applying the thick liquid to a spot above her eyebrow. Flynn looks from her to his Emma, looking at that same spot, looking for a covered up scar.  
Emma feels him staring. “I don’t have a scar there. She must’ve gotten it later. In our timeline, my mom and I left here when I was ten, it was 1992, February. I think this is what it would look like if we hadn’t.”  
The young girl is finished, and slips the tube of concealer into her pocket before grabbing her bag and heading out.  
Flynn nods, accepting the conditions of this timeline. His eyes follow the teenager. “I almost feel like I’m invading her privacy following her,” he admits, as he heads after her anyway.

Emma does not follow him. She stops at the top of the stairs, takes a deep breath and takes a seat on the top step. She doesn’t want to go down there if _he’s_ gonna be down there. And this time, he won’t surprise her by being a doting dad, with hot cocoa and forehead kisses under the Ursa Major. Here, he’s the man she remembers him being; he’s worse. And he’s right downstairs. 

Flynn’s never seen Emma scared. She’s _Emma_ , quite honestly before tonight he wasn’t even aware of the fact that she had emotions at all. Maybe she only did when she was dead (incidentally enough, when she was the least vulnerable… not like she could die again). He turns around halfway down and gingerly retreats to the top step, squishing between her and the banister.  
“I haven’t seen him since,” she mentions. “I didn’t forget his face, but, I haven’t seen him since we left. A-and you know he outlived me?” She laughs a little bit uneasily as she speaks, as if her spool is coming undone. “That bastard outlived me.” 

“I’d like to think this is the darkest, of the things I’ve wondered,” she admits after a moment. “I would be surprised if this version of me turned out okay.”  
“I think she could have,” Flynn admits. “If she got help.”  
“She’s not the one who needed help,” Emma responds, surprisingly sharp, “she didn’t do anything wrong!”  
“You don’t seek help because you did something wrong, Emma. You seek help, because… you need to heal, or something. You’re ready to heal.”  
“And remind me when _you_ got help, after your family was shot? Remind me what you did as a therapeutic release? I remember hearing something about a drinking binge in Brazil, and after that you brooded and plotted for two years before stealing a government regulated piece of machinery and wreaked absolute havoc on all of history.”  
“Do as I say, not do as I do. When have I ever proven to be a role model?” Flynn mutters. 

There’s yelling downstairs, an angry man raising his voice and a young and defiant girl, definitely having missed the school bus by now. Upstairs, there’s just the ghost of an older girl, still defiant to everyone but him. With him, she still flinches at the shrill of his voice– cause she’s had this fight with him before and heard him have it with her mother. They both know what comes next. Flynn distracts her so she won’t hear it.  
“What’s the best-case scenario?” he asks, thinking quick on his feet.  
“The best-case scenario is any one in which she doesn’t stay here for the rest of her life taking care of him and putting up with his shit,” she answers just as quick. “Even the scenarios that leave her dead in a ditch are better than that one.”  
“She ends up dead in a ditch?” Flynn probes hesitantly. “Never mind, don’t answer that,” he adds, very unsure he wants to hear where that thought was going. “What is the worst-case scenario, right this minute? Nevermind her future-”  
“Because she doesn’t have one?”  
“One minute at a time,” Flynn says, trying his best to exude enough calm energy to spread through her. She takes a deep breath. “Him hurting her, today. Her missing yet another of day school cause she can’t bring herself to go and face people and lie about why she’s hurt, because she won’t tell anyone. She never will. He’s told her not to and so has her mom, and she listens to them cause they’re her parents–”

She’s cut off by the shattering of glass below them, followed by a quiet scream, more of a whimper really. A door slams, and heavy footsteps head towards the stairs. The worst has happened. On her way up the stairs, headed for the bathroom again, their teenage punk doesn’t look so scary anymore, and the truth is she never was scary, Emma should have known that. She isn’t scary yet, anyways.

“I-I want to leave; get me out of here, now!” she says to Flynn. She’s seen more than enough, she doesn’t like this anymore.  
“You’re in charge of where we end up,” he reminds her. He doesn’t want to be here anymore either.  
He barely finishes his sentence before Emma’s up on her feet and taking long strides down the small hallway they’d come from, dragging him behind her. They end back in the room with the view, where they started. 

\--------

Except, it’s different now. The room is a stark, empty white and has that fresh paint, new house smell in studio apartment size, and there’s southern California sunlight streaming in through the window.  
“I don’t know where we are,” Emma admits.  
Flynn spreads the plastic blinds to take a look out the window, not seeing much, but he sees a parking lot and that’s enough for him. “Cars appear to be early 2000s models,” he notes. “We’re on the edge of a campus of some sort. When and where did you go to school?”  
“I went to Caltech, started my masters in ‘04,” she says, coming to look out the window as well. “This might be UCLA.”  
“Why are we at UCLA?” Flynn asks.  
“I only went to Caltech ‘cause Rittenhouse paid for it. Unless I wanted to be a gazillion dollars in debt I couldn’t afford it myself. So they offered, on the condition that I’d join them afterward. But I got into the aerospace programs at UCLA and UC Davis too.”  
There’s a beat, as Flynn debates saying anything. The saying goes, _if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all_. Emma knows. She’d rather not hear his opinion (ever). 

The sounds of giggles come from the bedroom, and the silence around them has shifted.  
“We’re not alone,” Flynn mentions. “It doesn’t sound like she’s alone either.”  
As if she has to tiptoe across the creaky floorboards, Emma moves over to the wall beside the bedroom, so she can peek in and see what her younger self is doing, not that she’s sure she wants to see. There’s a mattress on the floor with just a sheet sprawled across it and two pairs of feet in sight. “Yeah she just got some,” Emma nods quickly.  
Flynn rolls his eyes. “So we’re here spying on a horny college student in LA, why?”  
“Because she’s in LA,” Emma says, realizing it herself. “What is she doing with her life here, when she isn’t Rittenhouse?”  
“How is she filling her sick desire for power?” Flynn mumbles, half to himself.  
But Emma nods; he isn’t wrong, though he could’ve used nicer words. She wanted control, that wasn’t a secret, she wasn’t shy about it. Rittenhouse gave her a platform, gave her permission to do what she wanted under the veil of a cause. What platform would she have found if not that one?

“You should go.” They recognize that voice and her horrible chivalry. “You should really go.”  
“W-we’ll talk?” her bedfellow asks, clearly flustered that they’re being kicked out so suddenly.  
“Yeah, whatever, bye now!”  
And suddenly, there’s a half-naked brunette woman stumbling out of the small bedroom, trying to put her shorts on as fast as she can before leaving the apartment. “I said get out, what are you still doing here?!” Emma yells again, before the girl leaves in just her t-shirt. 

Flynn glances over to his Emma ever so slowly, trying not to laugh at her reaction. “Hey, love is love.”  
She has to pick her jaw up off the floor before she can answer, recovering nicely with a scoff. “That isn’t love! Of course, I support her fully, but she isn’t doing it with love in mind.”  
“That’s not hard to believe,” Flynn answers in acknowledgment. “You keep referring to _her_ as if she isn’t _you_. With each scenario so far she’s come closer and closer to being you.”  
Her eyes shift to him and back quickly, as they detect movement. Her young self has pulled her dress back on and is headed into the bathroom. Emma can see her clearly from here, and when she’s looking at her she can see that Flynn is right (which, she knew all along, but it sucked to admit). That was her at twenty-two– with one changed detail on her arms, which were scrawny and pale from spending all her time holed up either working or studying the past summer, not getting sun and not getting exercise. Not getting indoctrinated into a secret society and being trained to fight. 

She takes a swig of mouthwash and runs a brush through her hair, and just as she’s putting on lipstick the doorbell rings. “One second!”  
Emma takes a peek through the peephole in the meantime. “Its Mom, she brought flowers.” She lingers for a second, taking in the image of her mother standing outside her daughter’s apartment, flowers and a smile. She lingers until her young self comes out of the bathroom and swings the front door open. “Hello!”  
“Hi baby,” her mom says, wrapping her daughter in a hug. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t be here to help you move in, looks like you got in just fine though.”  
“Yeah yeah, everything went fine. Come in, we’ll order food and get those flowers in some water. Thank you for them.”  
“Of course.”

Their conversation flows so easily and nicely- Joanna had always tried to make up for the ugly relationship her daughter had with her father. And she’d been a single mother to a headstrong teenager who was too smart for her own good, she had to stay close. Emma watches them and she misses her mom, she misses their bond. She wishes she got to say goodbye, or, anything at all in years. Her mom, like most everyone else, believed that she died in a work accident in 2012. Obviously, she’d never truly known what her daughter did for a living, and she wouldn’t be proud of what she’d done with her life– 

“Is she kissing her mother with that mouth?” Flynn’s judgemental comment has interrupted her introspection. “It was just on a woman’s–”  
“It was _not_ ,” Emma fires back. “She wouldn’t do that, she wouldn’t… there…”  
Flynn raises his eyebrows quizzically. “Nah, of course she wouldn’t, she’s got such high standards.”  
“I’ve never put mine there,” Emma says, without any hesitation. “Not on a man’s, not on a woman’s. I’ve never been one to take it on the chin, in any situation.”  
“You have to remember, you’re getting your power somewhere else, and she isn’t. She’s using her sexuality as a means to feel confident and in control. I don’t think her limits are the same as yours.” 

“Your dress is… nice,” Joanna starts, in that way only a mom can. “You look nice.”  
“There’s a but coming,” Young Emma recognizes, putting the flowers in some water.  
“I’m just not used to seeing you dressed up, that’s all. You’ve always been my little tomboy. I don’t know which boy you’re trying to impress but I’d bet it’s working.”  
“You know I don’t dress up to impress boys, mom,” Young Emma responds dryly. “That’s not my style.”  
“I know, I know. You do it for yourself, you self-driven woman.”  
Flynn grunts. It was true to say Emma was self-driven, but, that wasn’t quite it.  
“Just be careful, my darling. You don’t want to be giving up who you are to serve someone else. You’re better than that.”  
Young Emma takes her mom’s hands in hers, leaning her elbows on the kitchen counter. She sounds so sure when she says, “You know I would never.” 

“Okay, we’re leaving now,” Emma decides abruptly. “Done being a disappointment to my mother, literally living out the one mistake she told me not to make.” She heads for a door in the hall, trying to find her way out, to wherever they’re headed next. She hits a dead end when she opens a hall closet.  
“Ah, the closet, how appropriate,” Flynn comments. “You should feel right at home in there.”  
She grumbles and pulls him into the tight space with her, without warning. Flynn forgot she had a damn strong grip. She focuses her mind, and then they feel themselves slowly dissipate into another reality.

\------------

“We’ve landed in a dump,” Flynn decides, looking around them. It would seem they have entered a damp feeling tunnel (if they left the bunker to rot a couple more years, it would probably feel something like this), with light at one end that caught Emma off guard. She didn’t know where she’d landed them. She really didn’t like feeling this out of control, flinging them through time and space aimlessly. It wasn’t aimless so much as it was subconscious– this was all in her mind, so a part of her _was_ controlling this. She didn’t like that either; her subconscious was a dark, angry place. They could be anywhere. 

But when her vision cleared up, she realized it wasn’t so much an ominous, glowing light at the end of the tunnel, it was just a room with the lights on, somewhere people went for privacy. She’d been here before, it makes her feel better to recognize their surroundings. “I know where we are. This is a Rittenhouse building in the Bay Area. I think they use it for training now, I’m not sure.”  
Flynn gives her a look, and she caves almost instantly. “It’s their training headquarters in Oakland. I trained there, they taught me everything I know. But it’s like the fight club, once you leave here you don’t talk about it.”  
“So I’m guessing, wherever we are, you’re still Rittenhouse.”  
Emma nods. “I would guess so.” She makes her way into the room with the lights on, her muscles remember where to go, like riding a bike. And sure enough, they find a familiar, young woman in the back corner with an old friend. 

Emma looks on at the girl almost proudly, as she takes boxing-gloved, swift swings at a blue punching bag. That was a peak point in her own life, it was the beginning of it all. It was the first taste of power she’d ever had; Rittenhouse had given her that, made her feel like she was strong and she could push back, she had the power to do that. Just maybe, that meant she could do anything. And that bag was the first enemy she had, the first thing she had to destroy before they would let her spar with other agents (which, she was almost always successful at, and it was something she prided herself on. Some of them– not to say exclusively men, but almost exclusively men– underestimated her. She looked mean, but she didn’t look tough. Little did they expect, she was both and so much more). 

A buzzer sounds, and she stops and takes a deep breath.  
“Well done, Emma. You’re getting quite good at this,” a voice says, joining the three of them in the room.  
“Who is that?” Flynn asks, looking at the tall, slender man and his satisfied smirk.  
“That’s Benjamin Cahill, Lucy’s father.”  
Ah, yes. Flynn had heard about him, but never met him. He nods, not wanting to make noise over their conversation.  
“Going home to the kids now?” they hear him ask.  
Alternate Emma nods. “Evan and I are going out tonight,” she tells him. “Tonight’s the night.”  
“Tonight’s the night, finally. It will go great, you’ve been grooming him for years. And you know he’s wrapped around your finger.”  
She smiles confidently. “By day’s end, we’ll have a new member.”  
“Hope you’re ready for your first trainee.”  
“You’re gonna let me train him?” she asks, clearly flattered, but taken aback. “I wasn’t expecting that.”  
“But you’re up to it? I wouldn’t let you if I didn’t feel confident in your abilities, Emma. You’ve proven to be a valuable asset to us, and you’ll continue to, by raising those beautiful, smart kids of yours.”  
“Of course I’m up to it. Thank you, Mr. Cahill, your trust means a lot to me.” 

Flynn glances at his Emma slowly, as if to look for clarity. “You’re raising Rittenhouse children,” he says slowly, his voice mourning those poor kids’ futures. “Not to mention recruiting your husband.”  
“ _She_ is raising Rittenhouse children, _I_ do not have children to raise, or a husband to recruit.”  
“Don’t make it sound like you wouldn’t make the exact same choices.”  
Before Emma has a chance to answer- agree- She is on the move. They lock eyes, nod, and follow her. 

As she’s getting changed, her phone rings. She answers it on speakerphone. “Hi honey.”  
“Mommy when are you coming home?” a small voice asks.  
“Soon, baby,” she answers. “What’s wrong?”  
“Nofing,” the little girl lies. “My tummy hurts,” she admits after a moment, on the verge of tears. “I fink I’m gonna barf and I want you.”  
She draws a contemplative sigh and begins to pick up the pace a little. “Okay babe, it’s okay. I’m coming home now. If you need something before I get there, you go to daddy, even if he’s on the phone, you go to him. Okay?”  
“Okay.”  
“I love you, I’ll be there soon.” 

Less than an hour later, Flynn and Emma are witnessing something almost peaceful and motherly. Something they had never expected out of the woman they saw kicking the shit out of that punching bag such a short time ago. 

The man that must be her husband, the little girl’s dad, comes treading into the room lightly. He’s wearing a nice suit, navy blue with a red tie, dress shoes, cologne. He’s ready to take his wife out for dinner. His wife… isn’t quite ready. She’s taken a very quick shower and changed into pajama pants and a tank top, so she isn’t a sweaty mess for the pint-sized princess sleeping on her chest. By looking around the house, at the many pictures on the walls and the simple regalness of the house itself, they would guess the man didn’t often see his wife like this– so… mundane. She looks up at him, then back down at their daughter. He sits beside them gently, a hand on his wife’s shoulder. 

Even though the younger version of herself shows no discomfort, Emma flinches. 

“Is she running a fever?” he asks.  
Mom Emma nods. “A kindergarten bug,” she predicts. “Remember Wes used to get these all the time? I feel like we were always here on this couch, with the barf bucket and the Children’s Tylenol.”  
The man nods. He brushes his daughter’s hair off her forehead- a little sweaty, and a little green- and plants a soft kiss. He plants an equally soft yet strong one on his wife’s forehead, almost exactly where she has that scar. 

And Emma’s tension releases, as if someone let go of a balloon. Physically, it’s subtle, but it doesn’t go unnoticed by Flynn. He doesn’t ask anything, he doesn’t say anything, he tries not to stare as she takes a deep breath, visibly relieved but trying not to show it.  
“I just thought everything looked too perfect,” she says quietly. “There has to be a catch, and I thought maybe it’d be him. Maybe he’d be horrible to them, maybe she married someone just like her dad, doomed her kids with a fate like hers, you know, they always say girls are bound to end up with people like their fathers.”  
“He doesn’t appear to be anything like your father,” Flynn reassures her. 

“I don’t think we can go out tonight,” Mom Emma says, looking up at her husband again. “Aspen needs me.”  
He nods. “We can celebrate our anniversary right here on this couch, a night in with one sick kid, one upstairs doing his homework, and a crazy dog running around. Nowhere else I’d rather be. Just, let me go get changed.”  
He jogs up the stairs, and as soon as he’s gone, Mom Emma slides her mini-me off her chest and onto the couch, covers her with a blanket, and slips into the home office, just off the living room. Flynn’s distracted, watching the child that admittedly reminded him of his own, but Emma has a watchful eye.  
“She just pulled out a burner phone,” she says. “And is that a gun case?”  
“I spot a gun case, probably fake passports, a stack of bills, and a half-empty fifth of Crown Royal,” Flynn agrees, finally snapping his focus back to the right place.

She punches a number into the burner phone quickly. “Tonight is not the night,” she reports. They’re guessing Benjamin is on the other line. “Aspen’s sick. I know you don’t know what it’s like to have your daughter need you considering you’ve never even met yours– it’s going to have to wait, it’s waited this long. I’m probably going to be home with her tomorrow too– yeah, well, sometimes, when you’re a stay at home mom, you have to stay at home and be a mom. Goodbye, Benjamin.” And with that, she locks the cabinet back up and is back on the couch with her daughter, like nothing ever happened.

“And there’s the other shoe. She’s a stay at home mom.”  
Flynn didn’t quite get why that was bad. Emma rolls her eyes, but explains it to him anyways. “She isn’t working, I would guess she didn’t even go to grad school, so she gave up her dreams and became a housewife, in the name of Rittenhouse. She’s being a good agent.”  
“A little bit boring but it could be worse, no?” Flynn asks.  
“It could be worse,” Emma agrees. “This is better for you, in this timeline. Better for Lucy and her boys. If she isn’t working at Mason Industries right now, she isn’t working on the Mothership. It isn’t going to be operational at the same time it would’ve been in our timeline, not to mention Mason would be down a test pilot as well as a brilliant engineer. And if I’d never met the Mason team- Connor, and Rufus, and Anthony- who knows if Rittenhouse would’ve been tipped off about time travel at all, who knows if I would’ve been the agent on the mission at all? If there was a time machine, at all, and if Rittenhouse got involved in it, at all, it’s still possible _I_ wouldn’t have gotten involved, at all. I have kids here, that’s dangerous. And I’d have to be home for dinner every night.”  
“So none of us would never be in this mess,” Flynn says. “At all.”  
Emma nods. “Yeah. Arguably speaking, of course. We can’t know anything for sure. At all.” 

“Would you have preferred this life?” Flynn asks. “Perfect looking, built on a foundation of lies.”  
“No,” Emma answers honestly. “Her life here looks so perfect it’s suffocating, that’s no way to live. If you think I’m insane, I’d bet you she’s kicked it up a few notches.”  
“That’s even possible?”  
Emma nods, smiling a little. “Not something you’d wanna bear witness to.”  
“I have to say,” Flynn starts, looking out in the living room at the young woman again, “she’s impressed me. I didn’t expect her to be… warm, I suppose.”  
“You were expecting a bad mother. It’s okay, I would expect myself to be a bad mother too, I still think I would be. But she’s different, somehow.” She shuts her mouth and points her chin, the way she does when she doesn’t want to risk becoming upset.  
The words that come out of Flynn’s mouth almost pain him. “Maybe you wouldn’t actually be a horrible mother.” He wants to say something more, but he just can’t bring himself to. He couldn’t, in good faith, say much more than maybe, when asked if the fire-bellied tyrant that stood in front of him would make a good mother. Yesterday, he would’ve said flat out no, and laughed in your face.  
“Maybe,” Emma answers. Her tone didn’t seem too convinced, but like Flynn, it was the best she could do in good faith. 

She seems to be asking the right question, because she feels it happening. They’ve seen all they need to here, so away they go. 

\------------

“If we landed in a timeline where I’m pregnant, we’re leaving.”

Flynn offers a measly shrug, looking around the drafty bedroom they have landed in. “It’s chilly in here,” he mentions. “Looks modern, though.”  
“We’re in the very relative present,” Emma tells him. “This was where Rittenhouse was based most recently. Before your team _‘took us down’_ , anyways. This was my room.”  
“A cold room for the Ice Princess, makes sense.”  
“The Ice Queen,” Emma corrects him. “I became queen when I eliminated Carol and Nicholas.”  
“Well excuse me,” Flynn mumbles. “Where is everybody? Already dead?”  
Emma motions for him to be quiet, listening for the creak of the stairs that she’d gotten used to in this house. Carol had lighter footsteps, she was harder to listen for, but there was never any mistaking when Nicholas and his big oaf feet were coming up the stairs, usually looking for her. She didn’t hear any footsteps at first, then a heeled, slightly crooked gait she didn’t immediately recognize. Her own. 

Having just returned from a mission- to the 50s, they would guess- the woman pulls off her heels with a huff and drops her polka-dotted skirt. Emma looks at Flynn, making sure he’s turned around. Sure enough, he is facing the other way, being respectful. 

Emma recognizes the next set of footsteps that thunder up the stairs, they’re Nicholas’ loud, annoying, stupid footsteps. They make her blood boil. _Why isn’t he dead here. He should be dead here._  
He bursts into the bedroom without so much as a knock, catching his Emma not fully dressed. She doesn’t say anything though, just covers up quickly. Not that he hasn’t seen it all before, because he has. He’s touched all the spots that made her want to squirm, cause she didn’t want his hands there, she didn’t particularly want any man’s hands there– but she couldn’t say anything if she was going to keep playing him the way she was. She had to suck it up. (Oh, no, bad choice of words.)  
“Carol set up, what did she call it, The Netflix, on the television downstairs,” Nicholas says. “Should we watch a film?”  
His Emma forces a smile, runs a hand along his face the way she knows he likes. “Let me just take off my makeup, and I’ll be right down.”  
“I don’t understand, why take it off? It makes you look so beautiful, it hides all the spots on your face.”  
She takes a deep breath and smiles again. “How would you like to have powder on your face all day?”  
“Well, that’s the price a woman pays for her beauty, isn’t it?” he asks. “It’s just part of your duties.” 

“Sayings like that are why I killed him,” Emma deadpans. “It took a lot of restraint to wait as long as I did.”  
“I thought you said they were planning to kill you?” Flynn clarifies. “So you killed them first.”  
“Yes, that too. But it was mostly for the jackassery that used to escape his mouth.” 

“I’ll be right down,” she says, patting his shoulder and willing him out of her room. _Please._  
“Very well.” More thunderous steps down the creaky stairs. She sighs in relief, pulls something from beneath her mattress, and heads for the bathroom. Emma manages to sneak in before she slams the door, leaving Flynn on the outside. It’s just the two of them now. Emma, and... Emma. It felt weird. And it was safe to guess that they were about the same age, just in timelines running parallel to each other. This really made her head spin.

She audibly gasps, seeing what Alternate Her had pulled from underneath her mattress– though she shouldn’t be so surprised, she expected this. Well, she’d actually expected to find her alternate self with a bulging bump, decorating a nursery as if she was actually fit to raise a child…

In the time it took for the lines to show on the stick, Emma could imagine Alternate Her was going through a similar thought process that she was. While she’d perched on the bathroom counter, Alternate Her was pacing, her eyes darting to the stick on the counter every few seconds, as if that would make time go faster. Nicholas was still alive in this timeline, she hadn’t (triumphantly and regretlessly) killed him, yet anyways. It would obviously be his… offspring. The thought of him being a father almost revolted her more than the thought of herself being a mother. 

Alternate Her turned off the timer she had put on her phone as soon as it beeped and grabbed the stick. The look on her face said the news wasn’t good, the way she pressed her lips and took a deep breath. Then she rolled up her shirt and took a look at her belly. She didn’t look pregnant, not at all. The test said six weeks, which was practically nothing. Her baby was the size of a sweet pea. Sweet pea.

There was a knock on the door a few minutes later that startled them both. “Emma?” Carol asks softly.  
Alternate Emma answers the door quickly and rushes Carol inside, closing it again. “What is wrong?” Carol asks. “Are you alright?”  
She thrusts the stick in her direction, looking away, she’s embarrassed. Carol… doesn’t look proud, that’s apparent, but Emma imagines this is the way she would act if it were her own daughter in this situation, the way her own mother would act. Somehow stern and soft at the same time, the way only mothers knew how to be.  
“You know that it’s your decision, of course, and I’ll help you with whatever you decide,” Carol says, carefully. Emma noticed she didn’t offer her support, in the outcome of the decision. She didn’t say she would stand by her, even if she didn’t agree with her choice. Her help was unconditional, her support wasn’t. An interesting encapsulation of Carol Preston. “I know you also know that this baby is family, now. They are Rittenhouse, and they will be treated and cared for as such.”  
“I want to get rid of it,” Alternate Emma announces immediately, coldly. “I don’t have time for this, I don’t want this.”  
Carol nods, pursing her lips. “That’s a big decision, so soon-”  
“It isn’t big, it isn’t anything. It’s a mistake I made and I want to erase it.”  
“I won’t deny it was a mistake,” Carol mumbles. “You know, I almost had an abortion. When I found out I was pregnant with Lucy.”  
Both Emmas raise their eyebrows and roll their eyes the same way, showing their distaste for the Rittenhouse Princess, and whatever was going to come out of Carol’s mouth next.  
“I’m glad every day that I didn’t.”  
“Really, _every_ day? Even when she makes our lives much harder than they need to be?”  
“She’s always made my life harder than it needed to be, from when she was an infant. But she’s also brought me so much joy, and healing, real healing. Being a mother will change you, Emma.”  
“That’s exactly why I don’t want it,” she answers stoutly. “I didn’t call you in here to ask for advice or to talk me out of making arrangements. I just wanted you to know. But if you tell Nicholas, don’t doubt that I _will_ kill you.” 

Emma had to laugh. It was in Carol’s best interest to take that threat seriously, even if she didn’t know it.

“I wouldn’t expect any less,” Carol nods. Her eyes dip down to her Emma’s stomach for just a brief second before she exits the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. “Nicholas is waiting for you, by the way.”  
Alternate Emma wraps the test in a tissue and tosses it into the waste bin, along with her dirty makeup wipes. But, for him, she refrains from tossing her hair up in a messy ponytail– he liked when she wore it down, she was even letting it get a bit longer than she liked for him– and re-applied some lipstick. And then she strolled downstairs to play the smitten girlfriend. 

Flynn’s waiting when the two of them exit the washroom, waiting for the juicy details.  
“She’s pregnant, and she wants to take care of it.”  
“As in…” Flynn trails off. He gets it. “I’m guessing that’s the decision you would’ve made, too?”  
She takes a moment in thought before nodding. “At this point, yes. Right away, it’s, a shock. It’s inconvenient. She’s probably furious with Nicholas– I would be, he refused to wear condoms, what kind of asshole does that?”

The memory of her little girl in the last timeline, Aspen, dances through her head. Emma hadn’t wrecked her, or Weston, her brother. She hadn’t been a cold, authoritarian parent. Perhaps, like Carol had the gall to say, they even brought joy and healing into her life. But, in this timeline she didn’t know that. She didn’t know them.  
“Do you think she’ll go through with it?” Flynn asks. “It’s easy to say, but to do…”  
“She’ll do what benefits her,” Emma says, without much doubt. “She’s going to make sure she gains from this mistake. I have an idea, I think she will too. There’s only one way she’s raising a baby with that waste of life.” 

“Nicholas,” Alternate Emma starts, approaching him from behind as he sits on the couch, fumbling with the remote control to scroll through Netflix. “May we talk outside for a moment?”

So, of course, Emma and Flynn follow them out to the back porch– calm and rustic, apt for the discussion Emma was almost certain would follow. Because her and Alternate Emma were so chronologically close, she was sure of her actions and her thoughts, they were as predictable to her as her own. They _were_ her own.  
Nicholas stares at her lips, a smile on his. Emma looks at his too, but she isn’t as content. She’s poised and in control as she begins to speak. “I just, thought you should know, I’m expecting a baby. Your, baby.”  
He looks as though he doesn’t believe her– chalk it up to his lack of knowledge on the reproductive process, or his hesitant trust in Emma as a person, in women as people, who knew. Unsurely, he places one hand on her waist and his other low on her stomach. “I can’t believe this. Are you ecstatic?”  
A bitter chuckle escapes her lips. “I’m not sure ecstatic is the word I would use. It definitely poses some complications.”  
“Because of your age? Usually childbearing women are much younger than you are.”

Flynn dares to glance over and catch the expression on Emma’s face, it almost makes him laugh. 

“Women my age give birth often without complications,” Alternate Emma points out, gracefully. “I mean in regards to our plans. We’re going to need another pilot, I shouldn't be flying in this state.”  
“Of course,” Nicholas nods. “Don’t worry about that. Pilots are replaceable; you, and this life that you’re carrying, are not.”  
She nods. “We’re going to have a summer baby,” she adds lightly. “July.”  
“We should begin preparation soon. But first, let’s watch our film.”

Carol is standing just inside the door with a glass of iced tea and proud smile, proud of the choice that’s been made.  
“Don’t get excited, granddaughter,” Alternate Emma tells her, her voice low. “Can you make me an appointment? There’s a Planned Parenthood at 85th and Enterprise. Please. And once again, if you tell Nicholas–”  
Carol nods, but she shakes her head in disappointment as she says, “I will call for you. As long as you never refer to me as your granddaughter again.”

Emma cracks a proud grin. “We really are the same person.”  
“Let me get this straight,” Flynn says. “She’s going to get an abortion, but not tell Nicholas–”  
“And then she’ll fake a miscarriage, or kill him first. While he believes she’s pregnant, she has complete control over him. He comes from the Early 20th Century, where you provide for the mother of your child at any cost.”  
“You really are a piece of work,” Flynn mutters. “There really is something wrong with you.”  
Her smile is almost sweet, as her noses crinkles and her eyes squint. Flynn would almost believe it was genuine, if it wasn’t coming from her. “Aw, thanks, Flynn. Coming from you it almost sounds like a compliment.”  
“It isn’t,” Flynn objects immediately.  
“You have to admit, it’s clever.”  
“I’m not gonna stroke your ego. Are we done here, can we leave? Forgive me if I’m not in the mood to watch the happy couple canoodle.”  
“Don’t ever call them the happy couple again,” Emma snorts, taking his wrist and leading them away, so she can concentrate enough for them to springboard to somewhere else. For the first time, he doesn’t tense at her touch. Considering this was the timeline that most showed her true colours, she found that… comforting wasn’t the word. Or, maybe it was. 

“When does this end?” she asks, before they leave this place. “When do I... you know?”  
Flynn doesn’t answer her question, settling in, ready for takeoff. “We’ll both figure it out soon enough,” he eventually gives.

\-----------------

“This is the last one,” Emma says when they land. She just knows. She isn’t quite sure how or why, but she knows. This is the end of the road.  
“Is it a good one, at least?” Flynn asks, opening his eyes slowly. He takes in their surroundings- familiar, yet not familiar. He’d been here once before, years ago. “Are we in The White House?”  
Emma had never been here. She’d been Flynn’s pilot on that mission, back in ‘54, but she’d hidden out on the ship (she’d actually holed up with a library copy of _Gone Girl_ , she hadn’t even cared she was missing the scenery. ‘54 was sexist and racist, and she had a good book to devour). She looks around at the ornate walls, the wood floors, the decor. “It sure looks like it,” she exclaims, her voice a clear display of her awe. “Who’s in office?”  
“It would appear you are.” 

She whips around at lightning speed to see what in the world gave Flynn that preposterous idea, _how in the world did he–_ oh, maybe it was the framed photo on the wall, similar to the ones they’d always seen in Federal buildings of past presidents and their VPs.  
“Good picture of you,” Flynn notes. “Makes you look distinguished. And less disgruntled than you do in person.”  
“How did this happen?” Emma asks under her breath, looking at the words engraved on the frame. _Emma R. Whitmore, 47th President of the United States._  
“This is all in your mind,” Flynn whispers. “You willed it to happen.”  
“I don’t want this,” she mumbles. “I’m a lot of things, but a public speaker, or a public figure at all, is not one of them. You know that.”  
“A pissed off woman does bold things,” Flynn replies dryly. “A Rittenhouse woman, even bolder, it would appear. I would love to know how many ways this country has gone to shit under your leadership.”  
“I would make a fine President,” Emma defends herself. “How hard can it be, if rich white men have been doing it for centuries? No offence.”  
Flynn’s response comes hesitantly. “None taken. I just have a question.”  
Emma gives him the go-ahead with a look.  
“I’m guessing you’re a Republican?”  
She smiles, a hand raking her hair away from her face. “You know blue just isn’t my colour.” 

“What are your values, what did you promise the people?” Flynn asks next.  
Emma shrugs, looking around the office for any indication. “I don’t know?” she says. “How would I know? I told you I don’t want this.”  
“But clearly a part of you does, look around us. You got yourself here, I’m _sure_ you did it running just on honesty and a little bit of elbow grease, like all good politicians do, no help at all. C’mon, Emma, you can’t say you’ve never thought about what you’d do if you were in charge of it all.”  
“Well, for one, I’d stop defunding women’s health initiatives,” she mumbles. She continues more clearly. “I’d support education– education is empowerment, and empowerment goes a long way. When people feel powerful, they can do anything.”  
“Sounds... almost idealistic,” Flynn nods. “When you say _people_ though, that’s a fairly loose definition. I’m guessing you mean people with money? People with privilege? You’ve never been interested in helping anyone you see as beneath you, quite frankly you’ve never been interested in helping anybody at all.”  
“And I’m not. This is letting them help themselves. It makes society individualistic, every man for themselves out there. But, there are benefits to be reaped, there’s more at stake.”  
Flynn wasn’t quite sure if he was impressed at her idea, terrified of it, threatened by it, or all of the above. “Why would you want that?” he finally asks.  
“Flynn, have you learned nothing about me on this journey?” she asks simply. 

Flynn stares at her in question– _God, he’s tired._ He rolls his eyes, he huffs, but he does not answer her. “Have you learned anything about yourself on this journey?” he deflects.  
“What kind of self-reflective crap question is that?” Emma asks, deflecting even harder. If he should’ve learned anything, it was how easily she could ward off anything that made her feel anything.  
“The point of this was to teach you something,” Flynn says. “For you to draw meaning from your life and the way things happened, or something. Did it work; are you enlightened?”  
She doesn’t answer, looking around the office still, rifling through papers, political agendas, things she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand why they were here, what kind of future this was. Why was this her future at all, what did it all mean?  
“Emma?” Flynn asks again. “Are you in there?” 

“One thing at a time, Flynn,” she hushes him. “I’m just wrapping my head around this timeline, we can debrief after.”  
“We don’t get an after. This is it.”  
_“Give me a second,”_ she growls, drawing out every syllable.  
“I know why we’re here,” Flynn mumbles. “If you let me get a word in, maybe I’d tell you. Save you some time, save you the headache of reading those papers you aren’t going to understand. You don’t understand them in this timeline either, and you really should. You’re the President.” He can’t help but laugh, that bitter bite in his tone. “But, you don’t know how you got here. Taking a look objectively at it, you got hungry. You got greedy. You just admitted it, when people feel powerful, they can do anything. You, in charge of Rittenhouse, wanted more. You wanted to be in charge of more. And what’s a modern way to rise to power? Politics. Do you understand the world you’re in, do you know what you’re doing? Absolutely not, you got lost in it. Who are you even, in this timeline? What do you stand for? The people wouldn’t trust you if they knew the real you. But, you don’t even know her anymore, so…”  
He’s standing right in front of her now, having slowly drawn nearer as he spoke. The look she’s giving him could cut glass, but, she knows he isn’t exactly wrong.  
“So, this was meant to teach me that I let power get to my head,” Emma says, her tone emotionless. It hadn’t gotten to her like it was supposed to, the emotional thunder had clapped over her head and the rain was coming down now… but she still had her umbrella up. The umbrella she lived under, she died under. At least now she realized it was raining. “And ultimately, I died because of it. If I hadn’t died, I’d end up a person I don’t recognize in a place I don’t want to be.”

“Why did we do this?” she asks. “What was I supposed to learn on this journey?” She takes a seat at the desk, cause why not. If she’s gonna go, go through the gates, finally… at least this last moment was cool.  
Flynn shrugs. “I don’t think there’s a set answer. I don’t know if you were meant to learn anything at all. This was your life flashing before your eyes, your last chance to ask all the questions you’ve always asked, about the different paths you could have walked. If you’d never been hurt, if you’d never gotten out of there-”  
“If I’d never joined Rittenhouse, if I’d never worked for Mason,” Emma takes over, her voice barely above a whisper. “If I hadn’t killed Nicholas and Carol, and if I hadn’t gotten killed.”  
“You got all your answers. There’s nothing left to do. It’s time to go now.” He reaches a hand out. 

“What if I don’t want to?” she asks, looking distrustingly at the outstretched hand, worn skin and tired knuckles. She doesn’t want to take it. She doesn’t want to die, contrary to even her own beliefs. Everyone can say they wanna die but when they’re staring down the barrel of a gun they’ll still beg a God they don’t believe in for forgiveness they don’t deserve. She was no different.  
“You know I wasn’t asking, Emma,” Flynn says, almost the smallest bit of remorse in his voice. “It’s time. I’m sorry.”  
“Nah, you’re not. But, thanks anyway.”  
Flynn nods, taking in what her brave face looked like. He’d seen her put that mask on more times than he’d realized. “You are welcome.” 

Finally, she reaches out and locks her scuffed up knuckles with his. He fades first, his lips turned up in something resembling a peaceful smile, until he’s no longer, and her hand’s holding nothing but air. And then she feels herself go too. And it didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt at all.

**Author's Note:**

> "....when we all fall asleep, where do we go?"
> 
> (The R. stands for Rosemary. Emma Rosemary Whitmore, 1982-2018. And Garcia Flynn, 1975-2018.) 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
